Thursday, July 5, 2001

So yesterday was the 4th of July, the day on which America celebrates the birth of our nation by blowing up a small piece of it (that's a stolen quote; I stole it from Lee, but I think she stole it from somebody else first; I don't know to whom it is originally attributed). As for me and my family, we sort of eschewed the whole fireworks thing...it was cloudy, sort of cold, and we were all full of barbecued meat and vegetables. We watched a movie instead.

Does that make us less patriotic? I don't know, but...

The most memorable fireworks display I recall experiencing was on July 4, 1994. I was celebrating the birth of my nation by leaving it: "Happy Birthday, America, sorry I couldn't stay for cake and presents and stuff, but I gotta get outta here for awhile. You understand."

At 6:30pm, I was boarding a plane for Prague, in the Czech Republic, where I would spend the next 6 weeks. I was going over to teach English to a bunch of Czech high-schoolers, presumably so that they would be more able to participate in the "Global Economy," which was and is pretty much dominated by American rules, ideals, and cash. I was reasonably sure that my friend Jeff would be there to meet me when my plane landed; I hadn't actually spoken to him about it, but I'd sent him my travel plans, and his parents had assured me that they had spoken to him and he knew I was coming.

I really had no contingecy plan if he wasn't there. I had never been outside the US, except for Tijuana, which doesn't count. I was on the plane, it was in the air, and I was going to be on Czech soil in 22 hours (with an 8 hour layover in London).

As the plane flew eastward and the sky darkened, I saw the first of the fireworks. They were relatively small, seen from 37,000 feet, but they were still strangely engrossing. Gradually, more and more fireworks began to appear. From our airborne vantage point, we could see several displays at once - at least a dozen were visible at one point - all these little concentrated displays of enthusiastic nationalism and love of country. It was strange, seeing all of this from above. It was unifying, in that you could see that the whole country was celebrating the same thing at once, but at the same time, the displays were so small from our viewpoint, and so localized, each seeming to have nothing more than coincidence to connect them.

In 1990, the Berlin Wall had come down. In 1994, I was on my way to Central Europe, where nations were simultaneously trying to join "The Global Economy" and reclaim their individual national identities. The effort continues to this day with the endeavor to create the European Union. Even in the U.S.A., people still argue and fight about Federal vs. States rights. As someone who has grown up in California and then travelled to other states, it has often seemed to me that we're no more unified than the separate nations of Europe. Culture evolves in pockets and eddies, be it within a single nation or distributed among many. Common language, common currency, a certain measure of common law, and still we're pretty divided.

So, what? "The more things change, the more they stay the same," or "variety is the spice of life," or "vive la differance," or "diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks?" What am I getting at here? Am I getting at anything at all?

I don't know. I just know that usually when looking at the earth from great altitudes, I am struck by how contiguous it all is, how the lines disappear, and all that. But this one time, when the Sun was down and the bombs were bursting in air, I saw the opposite, and began to wonder at what it means to be one of the largest nations, and arguably THE most powerful, on the globe. I wonder sometimes if it's real. Just who is the U.S.? Is it really us?

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